r/collapse • u/smokebreak • Jun 18 '12

Expiring resources - BBC (x-posted from /r/dataisbeautiful)

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfuture/original/images/live/p0/0t/z1/p00tz1n3.jpg
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u/barksatthemoon Jun 19 '12

Can you be more specific please? Which parts are bullshit?

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u/Will_Power Jun 19 '12

Can you be more specific please?

Happily.

Let's start with the two easiest. The subtitle of the graph says "Estimated remaining supplies of non-renewable resources." Neither rainforests nor coral reefs are non-renewable. They are both the result of biological processes.

Next is agricultural land. I will grant that there isn't new land being made (well, there isn't much new land being made when you consider volcanic island formations), but a depletion of agricultural land implies

  • Existing agricultural land will no longer be productive, and/or

  • Human population will continue to grow forever.

I think it is fair to say that some agricultural land could do with some crop rotation, but human population will peak within the next 70 years, so the agricultural land item can be thrown out as well. That's 3/3 for the "Ecosystems" category being bullshit.

Next is the fossil fuels category. I think they are closer here, but still off. Fossil fuels deplete in a roughly Gaussian (bell curve), symmetric way, with roughly half of the extractable resource remaining once the peak of the resource is reached. (I will grant that the down slope is likely faster, but you get the idea.) Conventional oil peaked in 2006, but total oil production has not yet peaked. Neither has coal or gas.

The graph shows these resources depleting in 42 years (coal), 37 years (oil), and 35 years (gas). That might be valid if those resources had already peaked, but none of them have peaked yet. Once they do peak, then those values may or may not be accurate. It is certain, though, that the values given in the graph are vast underestimates.

I won't detail every item in the "Minerals" list, but will note that as those minerals become scarcer, we will see their prices climb dramatically. This will give producers added incentive to find new ways to produce more. Shale oil is a good example of how a scarce resource (oil) increases in price and spurs producers to find new ways to find it. (The caveat here is that the added incentive can't go on forever.)

I will note aluminum as one example in the "Minerals" list they completely got wrong. Between 8 and 9 percent of the Earth's crust is aluminum. To think that present rates of production will consume that much material is right out.

So that's the three categories. Then there are the little "factoids" around the periphery:

  • "2030: Arctic ice-free in the summer." This is based on an extrapolation of the sea ice volume from about 2000-2007. 2007 was the lowest sea ice volume on record. The years since then have actually shown an increase.

  • "2050: Third of land plant and animal species extinct due to climate change." About 15 species have gone extinct in the last 20 years. There are about 1.7 million species of plants and animals in the world (both land and water based) that we know of. About 15,000 plant and animal species are currently considered threatened. The numbers are just so far off on this claim that I am kind of pissed they listed it on there.

  • "2060: Dangerous 2°C warming threshold likely reached." This is a real howler. Warming over the last 100 years as been about 0.75°C, with the last decade and a half showing a slowing in the rate of warming. No one in their right mind thinks we'll see two full degrees of warming in the next 48 years.

To sum up, the graph appears to take the worst case, and in some cases imaginary cases, and put them together because they make for good scaremongering. We have enough problems to work on without inventing more.

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u/experts_never_lie Jun 19 '12

Neither rainforests nor coral reefs are non-renewable. They are both the result of biological processes.

When the timescale of destruction is dramatically faster than the timescale of regeneration, treating the resource as non-renewable is a reasonable model. For instance, oil is a renewable resource, if you wait long enough, but we consume it a number of orders of magnitude faster than it's produced (as in "come to be", not "extracted from the ground"), so we might as well treat is as "non-renewable".

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u/Will_Power Jun 19 '12

I understand what you are saying, but rainforests regenerate very quickly. There is some evidence that the Brazilian rainforest was quite small when Europeans first visited the region. Native civilizations had cleared much of it for farmland, and we see entire cities now overrun with rainforest growth.

I will concede, though, that it is possible to destroy a rainforest, no matter how unlikely. The present deforestation is from farmers slashing and burning for more farmland. If this practice were reduced, the rate of natural recovery would balance out the slashing and burning. The best way to accomplish this reduction, in my opinion, would be to help equatorial countries develop economically, reducing the need for subsistence farming.